I adopted Judge about two years ago, an enormous, dignified orange cat who was already fully grown and already named something else at the shelter, a name I don’t even remember now because it never fit him once I got him home. I’d just finished Blood Meridian for maybe the third time, still fully under the spell of Judge Holden, that hairless, terrifying, endlessly self assured character who is somehow always right within his own logic, and I looked at this enormous cat sizing up my apartment like he already owned it, and the name just arrived. I didn’t debate it long.

He’s earned it, honestly, in his own domestic, much lower stakes way. He knocks things off shelves with a specific deliberateness that I swear is not accidental, holds eye contact through it the entire time, and has never once looked apologetic about anything he’s broken. There’s a particular ceramic mug I loved that he pushed off the kitchen windowsill over the course of maybe four separate mornings, inching it a little closer to the edge each time like he was working toward a conclusion he’d already reached, and when it finally went he didn’t even flinch at the sound. Dana refuses to say the name, calls him “the cat” pointedly, on the grounds that naming a pet after literature’s most amoral character is asking for something. I think that’s exactly backwards. Judge Holden’s whole horror is that he’s coherent, relentless, never breaks character, and my cat has those same three qualities applied entirely to the project of getting fed twenty minutes before his actual dinner time. It feels less like a dark joke than an accurate description.

He’s also, for what it’s worth, enormous in the specific way that makes strangers ask about him unprompted, fourteen pounds of solid orange cat who takes up most of whatever surface he decides to occupy, and I’ve had more than one guest ask his name expecting something ordinary and then go quiet for a second when I tell them. Ted’s theory is that the name has actually made Judge worse over time, that I’ve been unconsciously reading meaning into completely normal cat behavior because the name primed me to see something sinister in it, and I don’t fully disagree. A cat knocking a mug off a windowsill is just a cat being a cat. It’s only because of what I named him that it reads, to me, as something closer to a verdict.

I’ve had a few people ask, only half joking, whether it’s strange to bring a name that heavy into an ordinary domestic space every day, feeding him, cleaning his litter, watching him sleep in a sunbeam like the least threatening creature alive. I don’t think it is. If anything it’s done the opposite of what you’d expect, every time I call him for dinner I think for half a second about the actual Judge Holden, and the gap between the two is so wide it’s almost funny, and I like having that small absurd collision sitting in my apartment every single day. Ted still calls it a bad idea. I have not been persuaded to rename him.